Allright. So flash-back to 1996. The Transformers fandom existed in a different form back then. The Beast Wars toyline - which hit the fandom almost completely by surprise - had just begun showing up on store pegs, and the summer "sneak peak" of the Beast Wars pilot was a sample of the first new Transformers television series in over a decade.

And then there was BotCon 1996, managed for the first (and last) time by Dennis Barger's Men In Black. It had... uh... problems. But I was there! At a TRANSFORMERS convention! And (mostly) enjoyed it for what it was, only noticing its sundry flaws in retrospect.

There were prototypes on display at that convention which were not shown at subsequent ones (or, if they were, not with the same level of fanfare). Of course, digital cameras were practically unheard of in 1996, so the number of photos (good or otherwise) of them is kind of limited, compounded by the low attendence numbers as compared to following conventions.

With that in mind, I present these photos I recently unearthed. They aren't especially good in a photographic sense - I think you can see my thumb in the first one - but they're photos no one else has seen from a convention that's a decade old.